TEHRAN - Donald Trump first imagined that the war will last hours or days but weeks have passed and the U.S. is sinking deeper into the Iran quagmire.

At first, he said the attack on Iran is an operation and not a war. But everything changed immediately.

Failing to force Iran into a capitulation, he has been making foolish and astonishing remarks such as a "whole civilization will die" that "never to be brought back again," they will be sent back “to the Stone Age”, etc.

Now he has resorted to the desperate and risky attempt of naval blockade on Iran while the two-week ceasefire between the two countries, that went into force on April 8, is still, according to himself, “holding well”.

Iran’s resilience in the face of the illegal war has made the U.S., which is considered the greatest military power in the world, look weak in the eyes of its rivals and friends. His war has laid bare the U.S. vulnerabilities and instead made Iran look very resilient and strong. It is for these reasons that Professor Robert Pape from the University of Chicago has said “the war is turning Iran into a major world power”.
 
Although Trump does not lose any opportunity to say the U.S. has the “best” military, aircraft carriers, warships, ammunitions, fighter jets, etc., this is not the whole story. Now it is mostly the war of wills rather than advanced weaponry. 

Trump’s United States has lost the war militarily, politically, diplomatically, economically, and most importantly morally and legally. 

Fareed Zakaria, an American political commentator and author, has said “the   U.S. is acting like past hegemons”. 

In a post on Facebook, Turkish newspaper Yeni Safak says, “President Trump will go down in history as the leader who ended American hegemony and accelerated U.S. decline. It also said, “The Iran war exposed the limits of U.S. power, led to isolation by allies, and marked a turning point where Trump's imperial strategy was turned back from Tehran.”

Politico also says the war in Iran pulled back the curtain on the Trump administration. 

Trump’s unwarranted war has drawn a strong backlash from the world, including Washington’s Western allies. Also, the polls show that the percentage of American citizens who are turning against the war is increasing.

“The conflict has proved messier and more complex than Trump expected. The resulting energy shocks have damaged the domestic economy and alienated allies. The already-limited political support for the war at home has rapidly eroded, even among some of Trump’s erstwhile supporters,” Politico states.

Unhappy that American NATO allies did not join his unprovoked war, he has threatened to pull the U.S. out of the military bloc. This statement along with his rants against certain European leaders as well as Pope Leo XIV, who has censured the war on Iran, clearly shows that he hast lost the direction and making the U.S. isolated.

Except extremists in the U.S. and Israel as well as Republican Congress representatives, who put partisan interests above national interests, nobody backs his war of choice.

Facing helpless and finding his administration in an imbroglio, he asked “about 7” countries on March 15 to send warships to the region to open the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway at the mouth of the Persian Gulf that Iran had partially closed to oil tankers in response to the illegal war. Earlier he had appealed to China, France, Japan, South Korea and Britain to do so.

Italy, whose rightist leader was considered a close friend of Trump, also rejected a plea to send any ships to help police the Hormuz Strait. Italy rejected the plea even after a two-week ceasefire was announced between the United States and Iran on April 8.
“It is not on the agenda,” Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini said, adding, “We have already said that we will not send ships unless there is a United Nations initiative.”

The point is that wherever Trump looks and whatever he does he gets more cornered and more disappointed globally and this has made him to make chaotic and confusing remarks.
 
For example, he claims a regime change has taken place in Iran; its military power has been decimated. However, before the pause in fighting, he did not have the courage to send his military forces to the Strait of Hormuz. 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has urged Republicans to "put patriotic duty over party and stop the madness."
Congress "must immediately end this reckless war of choice in Iran before Donald Trump plunges us into World War III," he warned.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has also said, “Each Republican who refuses to join us in voting against this wanton war of choice owns every consequence of whatever the hell this is.” 

It is to the benefit of Trump and the interests of the U.S. to listen to the warnings by his opponents and not encouragement by senators like Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Secrtary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War Peter Brian Hegseth or Benjamin Netanahu of Israel.

Now Trump may think that the naval blockade of Iranian ports will choke off Iran’s oil revenues and force it to accept his administration’s terms. But Iran has been under “maximum pressure” sanctions he introduced since his first administration and knows how to deal with the blockade. It has more than 8,000km (5,000 miles) of land and sea borders in addition to other leverages.

Trump and Rubio, who also acts as the president’s national security advisor, must think carefully why the people and politicians in the world loathe the aggression against Iran. Before facing dire predicaments like the one that President Lyndon Johnson faced in Vietnam and George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq, Trump is better to put an end the war with Iran.
  
To do so, he must swallow his pride and give up his maximalist demands from Iran and find an exit route from his war of choice as soon as possible, especially as JD Vance, his chief negotiator in the talks with the Iranian side in Islamabad, has said Iranian negotiators wanted to make a deal and that he felt “very good about where we are.”